Where organic and artificial intelligence meet

Menu

Castaway on Piller Island

Nelson Lawrence Simon had been living the dream, sailing around the world in his 36 foot sloop until his rudder chain broke during a storm. The spare, which he thought he’d packed so carefully, had been exposed to four months of salt and moisture and had rusted.

Current washed him up on the north shore of an island, Piller, according to his charts. There was some sort of electrical interference that was jamming his radio, but he saw structures in the distance, so maybe someone lived here.

Simon was halfway up what looked to be an abandoned trail when he spotted the nest. He brought provisions with him, but it had been a long time since he had fresh eggs.

“Damn. Too late.” He watched as the first of the eggs broke open, but wasn’t prepared for the emergence of the occupant.

“What? I thought alligators laid eggs closer to water.”

As a shadow fell over him from behind, he realized it wasn’t an alligator. He turned and had just enough time to recognize a velociraptor from those “Jurassic” movies before he was messily devoured, well mostly. The rest of him would feed her hungry brood.

I saw the eggs and was crestfallen, because I didn’t want to write about bird eggs. Then I decided to leverage my series of stories based on The Kaala Experiment, a time travel device that’s gone wrong and brought a whole bunch of dinosaurs forward to the present on an island in the South Pacific. Nelson Lawrence Simon never had a chance.

This is spun off of a much larger story (10,000 words) I’m planning to submit to a magazine later this month. It’s an open submissions call for “military horror.” Frankly, I don’t think I have much of a chance of being selected, but it’s fun to write. Oh, the experiment is out of control and either the humans on the island have been devoured, or the timeline has changed such that they never existed.

I think one of the lessons demonstrated by the “Jurassic Park” films was that, with some sorts of critters, there can never be enough sufficiently-reliable precautions to ensure human safety. I’m afraid a 2nd grader’s love of dinosaurs would be very short-lived if confronted with an actual velociraptor, as would the tasty 2nd-grader. [:)]